Effective Ways to Incorporate Coupon Marketing into your Business Strategy

Sometimes, offering rock bottom discounts can have a negative impact on a business that is already booming.

More and more experts are of the belief that instead of relying on these codes to encourage sales at the point of checkout, there are more savvy ways to use these tools to track customers and develop effective affiliate relationships.

• Using Coupon Codes to Retarget Cart Abandonment Strategies

Especially if you are an ecommerce startup like Freecharge, finding your space in the competitive market is rather challenging. Business owners can make use of these coupons intelligently in their strategy by retargeting them in shopping card abandonment emails and banners. This helps woo shoppers back to the website.

• Using Partners for Distribution

Making smart use of your partners to distribute your special discounts is an effective way to enhance your reach. Make sure that your coupons are time based and/or quantity based since you may also have to assign a percentage as commission on sales for your partners to give them an added incentive to promote your coupon.

• Using Coupons to Measure and Track ROI

By using a different code for each ad outlet, i.e. Google, Facebook and Bing, you will be able to quantify exactly how much sales each ad positioning has been able to bring in. With a little bit of help from your tech and SEO teams, you can also effectively use these codes to track keywords success rates for effective optimization.

• Using Coupons to Reward your Loyal Fans on Social Media

Leverage your fan pages and social media accounts to provide coupons and discounts. There are a number of third party apps that let you generate and share such codes. Instead of offering codes to all your followers, you can target your discounts to your most loyal followers with the help of these third party apps.

• Using Coupons to Track Sources of Revenue at Events

Codes are an effective way to track different sales channels and asses which ones work best for you. A number of businesses choose to give their marketing partners unique discount codes that they can distribute. Businesses are able to assess which channels bring in more sales and find ways to optimize those.

• Using Coupons as an Effective Call-to-Action

Use codes to offer exciting discounts to first buyers. This strategy often creates a sense of scarcity, luring more people to take action faster and make their purchase decision quicker. By creating a component of scarcity, you may be able to attract people who are on the fence to finally take the leap.

• Using Coupons to Learn Customer Behavior

While most businesses focus on only enhancing conversion rates, the bigger opportunity lies in using coupon codes to delve more into behavioral patterns your target audience follows. By using unique codes through different channels, you are able to put to test different discount formats, and then move on to maximize conversions on the basis of real information.

• Using Codes to Compete in a Crowded Market

Most businesses directly choose to jump into the game of competing on price. This may not always be a viable strategy especially for newer businesses. However, the use of promo codes can be extremely effective if you intend to compete with other sites that are selling the same product. In such cases the extra 2% off can make a shopper chose your site over a competing website.

In addition to this, your promo codes can also be effectively used to close sales, to collaborate with affiliates and design a long term strategy that doesn’t necessarily eat into your profit margins. With some creativity and strategic synergies your promo code strategy can prove to be more effective than ever!